I cannot remember which birthday it was; I think I was turning thirteen. Unbeknownst to me, my Mom was attempting to orchestrate a small surprise on my behalf. I remember my friend Wendy asking me to go somewhere in a manner that seemed out of the norm. My antennae went up; it felt as though I was being covertly steered. Things were happening, behind the scenes, over which I had no control. I became uncomfortable and resistant. The thing is – I liked birthdays and I trusted my friends and family. It was a knee-jerk reaction: I wanted to know what was going on. In the end, due to my lack of cooperation and hyper-awareness, I effectively ruined my own surprise.

On the other hand, as a child, I once hid a dollar in hopes I’d forget where it was and happily discover it later. When I eventually did find the dollar, even though I’d forgotten about it, the experience was lackluster. Having engineered my own surprise, I just knew too much. It’s those incalculable factors – in life and in story telling – that make things so interesting and joyful. I had wanted the delight a surprise can bring but without any of the unknowns and uncertainties. As the years have gone by, I still can’t consider myself an embracer of surprise. But recently, I encountered a surprise that made me think about them differently.

When I was a child, my mother took me shopping for shoes. I tried on a pair; she pressed on the toes, squeezed the sides, and instructed me to walk around the store. Then she asked, “Will you wear them?”  I stared down at my feet, hoping to find the answer there. The question was difficult. What if, for some reason, I did not wear them? It seemed important - maybe too important. And that importance weighed on me. The more I pondered the question under the dominant influence of my mother’s interest and concern, the more tentative I became.

 During my school years, I believed almost everything was important. In high school, I had trouble sleeping for a year because of that belief. There is a way to redefine importance so it doesn’t lead to indecision, insecurity, manic behavior and/or sleep deprivation. Focusing on interest more than importance can put us in a naturally engaged, unpressured position. For most of high school I didn’t think I was interested in anything. In truth, I was focusing so much on assignments and grades and so little on what was compelling to me, I didn’t even realize just how interested I was. I had accidentally taken myself out of the equation.

 Our human minds are capable of making us feel wobbly about almost anything, and the story of importance sets the stage for just how much we wobble. A so-called important decision is much harder to make than a seemingly unimportant one. And we believe things are important when we think our happiness is somehow on the line, and that the power to be happy lies outside of us.

For many years, whenever my husband went out and was the slightest bit late in returning, my youngest son would inevitably declare, “He’s dead.”  It wasn’t just his father; he routinely came to this conclusion regardless of the person or circumstances. He was also quick to diagnose physical symptoms as cancer or, less specifically, something terminal.  When we watched movies together, at the start of every film he would question why a character was upset or happy, ask what had happened, or demand explanations for just about everything. We encouraged him to wait and allow the story to unfold. There simply wasn’t enough information available to answer. But he continued asking – striving to pin things down that were still in the process of unfolding.

Watching my son rush toward answers (even unwanted and wrong ones) sheds light on how my own preoccupation with solutions and outcomes takes me out of the flow and into anxiety. I might believe it’s the unknown that’s causing my angst but, in truth, labeling uncertainties as “problems,” as well as the urgency to fix them, creates the distress and unease.

A bud needs time to open. There is no manual or mechanical method for expediting that process. It has to happen on its own using the natural intelligence that knows how to bloom. Noodling with it won’t help and most likely will hurt. We don’t call a bud a problem because it has yet to bloom. An experience can also be seen similarly – as in progress, in the process of blooming into the next thing. This is a less stressful way of receiving life and keeps us working with things rather than trying to fix them.  

When I first started art school it wasn’t uncommon for me to periodically melt down. I perceived myself as under great pressure – time-wise and creatively – and feared I wouldn’t be able to pull it all together. With my focus fixated on external conditions and demands, I had a hard time functioning well. I was staring at aspects of my reality as though they were parts of a thousand-piece puzzle I had to assemble in ten minutes. My mind jumped from one piece to the next saying, “I don’t know where this one goes; I don’t know where that one goes; I don’t know . . .” I felt insecure and overwhelmed because confidence is an inside job and cannot be known while our attention remains outwardly fixed.

Sometimes I was so overwhelmed I’d get in the shower and weep. Afterwards, I’d wash up on the shore of my bed, and then, soon . . . get up and do the assignment. Post panic, I allowed myself to return to ideas and inspirations, and use my inner (rather than outer) vision. In this way, I reunited with confidence. I didn’t gain confidence by forcing myself into action, but by letting my focus shift back to me – breaking the spell of external demands. 

In an interview, comedian and late-night host Conan O’Brien spoke of suffering from intense anxiety (a familial trait) all his life.  He said there’s one thing that has always gotten him through.  “At my very core there is this tiny little seed of pure confidence . . . It’s sometimes hard for me to find . . . but it’s there.”  It’s common to think we need a lot of confidence to create what we want, in which case feeling confident can seem impossible, but a seed is actually plenty.  And when we know confidence exists at the core of who we are, then we know where to look for it, as well as where it cannot be found.

I watched video in which a five-year-old boy at a karate dojo tried to break a board with a kick. His teacher coached him, but the boy fell down the first time he tried. The boy kicked again but did not use enough force. He cried and rubbed his eyes. The rest of the children cheered him on by chanting his name.  He continued to cry. The teacher reminded him he could do it. The boy tried again and failed, but then, in a split second, something in his countenance and attitude changed and his next kick broke the board.  The children cheered, ran in, and hugged him. Though surrounded by encouragement and support, it was his internal shift that was key. He went from staring at something he couldn’t yet do, to rooting himself inward where he found that seed of confidence – his power.

My father died recently. He was eighty-five years old and died in his sleep. When we arrived at his house, the police officer told us we could look at the body if we wished. The emergency care workers had laid it on the floor in his bedroom. After some time, I walked up the steps and peered in from the doorway. There it was – covered with a sheet – and the first thing I thought was how very small his body was – much too small to have housed him.   

All that intelligence; he was an idea-, word-, movie-, book-loving, writing, teaching, leading director of all sorts with an unrelenting persistence and stubbornness. Everything I knew about my father, which was certainly not his totality, must have streamed through his physical self but couldn’t have been contained in it. 

It made me think of neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor’s 2008 TED Talk in which she describes suffering a hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain. Her language-centers, memory, and logic gradually went “offline.” She describes being unable to define the boundaries of her body – seemingly blending molecularly with her environment and losing her personal identity. She says she knew a great peacefulness. “I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie liberated from her bottle . . .. I remember thinking there’s no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny, little body.” 

My mother was five years old, almost six, when she became so ill she was taken to the hospital in an ambulance; she had contracted polio. It would be another ten years, around 1953, before the vaccine would be made available. In the 1940’s and 50’s, polio was peaking and understandably there was a lot of fear of the risk of paralysis and possibly death. But my mom doesn’t remember being frightened or missing her parents while in the hospital during her quarantine. She felt cared for, she felt safe, and the effects of the polio eventually faded and her body recuperated. Her mother, on the other hand, suffered exhaustion for many months afterwards. The emotional toll had been great.  My mother actually lived the experience; while her mother lived through a projection of what might happen – a projection that frightened her so much, it left her depleted. 

When I was eight I was so frightened of school the only thing I wanted was not to feel so afraid any more. I locked myself in the bathroom, I hid, I even jumped out of a (slowly) moving car to try to escape going to school. One night I slept under my bed, on the wooden floor, without a blanket or pillow so the bed would appear unused and give the illusion I had left. At age five, my mother had a logical reason to be frightened – separated from her parents, in a hospital by herself.  Objectively, at age eight, I did not. Yet I was terrified and she wasn’t. But my mother’s premise was that she was safe, her life was good, and people were taking care of her. I was operating from another premise. 

I was watching The Tonight Show, and Jimmy Fallon was playing a game in which he and his guest took turns reaching inside a box through slots. The box had one open side that faced the audience so everyone knew its contents except the one playing. As the game began, instinctively the participants’ minds went on the lookout for evidence of danger, attempting to keep themselves safe. Whenever they came in contact with the unknown objects (Peeps marshmallow bunnies, cinnamon rolls, earthworms, a frog), they overreacted and jumped back, certain it was something undesirable. The game was fun to watch, but in day-to-day life, the process of negatively projecting, avoiding the unknown, and fearing what might happen is tiring at best, crippling at worst. When our internal stories are about possible threats, then taking another step, going forward with a project, relationship, or a move of any kind can be frightening, even painful – because expectation and projection affect us so greatly. 

In an article I read on pain science, the author included documentation of a builder who had jumped down onto a 15 centimeters-long nail. Any movement of his foot was so painful, that in order to be treated he had to be completely sedated. Once tended, they found the nail had not entered his foot at all; it had gone between his toes. His foot was completely unharmed. But he had been in excruciating pain. The pain was real, but it was also incorrectly informed. 

I was lying in bed the other night unable to sleep. My right leg was aching so intently I couldn’t seem to pull my attention from it. I had injured a muscle, hadn’t realized it was much of anything, but gradually discovered it was something. My leg seemed to want to move, yet any attempt at movement increased the pain. After two hours of trying to fall back to sleep, I decided to get up. Supporting my troubled leg, I hoisted it out of bed, placed it gently on the floor and hobbled from the bedroom, giving into to both the insomnia and the discomfort. The next day, I whined and limped, angry I’d somehow done this to myself, and angry at the condition for getting in my way. 

After a couple days spent shaking my fists at the gods as both my mobility and frame of mind became increasingly compromised, I realized I had to give up. Not give up on getting better – give up on fighting. I was mentally flailing, unwilling to give myself a moment’s peace. I needed to stop. In order to allow my body to restore itself, I had to stop interfering; and I came to understand that my mental resistance was the interference.